Ph.D.(Engg): Investigations on Hypersonic Laminar to Turbulent Boundary Layer Transition in a Shock Tunnel.

The laminar to turbulent boundary layer transition onset has perplexed fluid dynamics community irrespective of the flow regime under which the phenomenon is probed. The complexity of the problem is compounded in high-speed compressible flows where in the transition onset location is a strong function of many subtle factors like freestream quality, surface roughness, wall temperature etc. The transitional and turbulent boundary layers bring their typical characteristics, like an increase in skin friction, heat transfer, fluid dynamic parameters fluctuations, mixing characteristics, potential to negotiate adverse pressure gradient, along with them. These typical characteristics of transitional and turbulent boundary layers can be both detrimental and advantageous to a given facet of an aerodynamic vehicle design. Hence the boundary layer transition onset location is one of the key design inputs in the development of aerodynamic vehicles operating in subsonic, supersonic and hypersonic freestream environment. A plethora of work has been conducted to investigate the transition onset phenomena in supersonic and hypersonic flow regime since the beginning of space age and the inception of the idea of an air breathing hypersonic cruise vehicle. The outcomes of these investigations and studies on high-speed boundary layer transition onset although led to the development of several techniques and correlations to estimate the transition onset location, applicable usually to a particular test model and freestream condition, very few studies targeted the characterization of transitional boundary layer in hypersonic flow regime. The earlier and contemporary work on roughness induced transition onset focused on the effect of the said roughness element on transition onset location but the features associated with the instabilities thus generated by these roughness elements have seldom been reported in the open literature. Hence characterization of transitional boundary layer and the instabilities associated with the same was one of the primary objectives of the present work.
The present work on hypersonic boundary layer transition was conducted in a shock tunnel HST4 by employing generic test models like flat plate, cone and elliptic cone. The work began with the design, development and deployment of a new contoured nozzle, with a nominal Mach number of 6.0, for HST4. Before embarking on the boundary layer transition studies, dedicated efforts were made to characterize the freestream noise environment of the test section of HST4 by employing experimental and numerical methods. A two-dimensional finite difference Navier-Stokes solver was developed in order to numerically compute the transfer functions required to retrieve freestream pressure fluctuations from the experimental measurements. The RMS of pressure fluctuations in the test section of HST4 was found to be 4.32% for the freestream Reynolds number of 4.5 million/m with major contribution of low frequency fluctuations (<50 kHz) towards the aforementioned RMS magnitude. The transitional boundary layer on smooth surface of a flat plate and an axisymmetric cone were characterized by experimentally measuring the intermittency associated with such boundary layers. The intermittent nature of the transitional boundary layer results from the convection of the turbulent spots along the boundary layer. The leading edge and trailing edge velocities associated with these turbulent spots as well as their generation rates were experimentally measured and computed. The second mode instabilities, a typical characteristic of high Mach number boundary layers, were also measured in terms of pressure fluctuations and the bandwidth of these instabilities was found to be in the range of 240-480 kHz. The wavelengths associated with these instabilities were found to be 2.5 times the local boundary layer thickness. Transition onset due to the presence of an isolated roughness element, either a protrusion or a three-dimensional shoe box cavity, was also investigated as part of the present campaign. Both isolated protrusion and cavity led to an early onset of transition when compared to the smooth test models with no isolated roughness element. In the case of transition onset due to an isolated cubic protrusion, the Shuttle Orbiter correlations were found to be inadequate in estimating the transition onset and correlations based on the present dataset were formulated. A single frequency oscillation with a narrow bandwidth centered around 23 kHz corresponding to hair pin vortices in the wake of roughness element was found in the present work. It was also found that while the protrusion suppressed the second mode instabilities, the cavity aided in the development of high frequency instabilities akin to second mode. Finally initial findings of the transition onset due to cross flow instabilities in an elliptic cone were also discussed in the present work.

Speaker : Ankit Bajpai

Research Supervisor : Prof. Gopalan Jagadeesh